Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Archive for the ‘Privatization’ Category

Yet another courtroom setback to Jindal education ‘reform’

Posted in BESE, Budget, Charters, Courts, Education, Governor's Office, Legislature, Legislators, Privatization, Revenue on March 4, 2013| 11 Comments »

State District Judge Mike Caldwell, who earlier threw out parts of Gov. Bobby Jindal’s education reform law that limited the authority of local school boards has dealt another crushing blow to the Louisiana’s gonenor’s* overreaching education revamp.

Caldwell had earlier left intact the provision that made it more difficult for teachers to attain job protection via tenure but on Monday agreed with the Louisiana Federation of Teachers and reversed his previous ruling, saying that the entire bill must be declared unconstitutional because too many different items were crammed into it.

In previous court cases, Judge Tim Kelley, Caldwell’s contemporary in the 19th Judicial District which is East Baton Rouge Parish, had struck down the method by which the state, through Jindal’s school voucher program, planned to pay private-school tuition with public funds.

Both Kelley and Caldwell are Republicans and Kelley’s wife served as Jindal’s commissioner of administration during most of his first term.

Prior to those two rulings, a federal judge knocked down the proposed voucher program, saying that it had the potential to disrupt a desegregation consent decree in Tangipahoa and possibly other districts.

Another 19th Judicial District Judge, Republican Tim Morvant, ruled back in January that a 401(k)-style retirement plan for future Louisiana employees was unconstitutional because it had received only a simple majority of legislative votes instead of the required two-thirds vote.

The administration has said in each case that it would appeal and repeated that assertion following Monday’s ruling but all in all, it’s not been a good few months in court for Jindal and his attorney, Jimmy Faircloth.

But at least all those appeals will keep the meter running for Faircloth.

*Gonenor is a hybrid word coined by one of our readers (we only wish we could take credit) that combines the words “gone” and “governor,” which, when combined, implies (correctly) that Gov. Jindal is often absent from the state.

Read Full Post »

Greenstein eliminates internal audit function at DHH; two years later, $800K misappropriated (privatization at work)

Posted in Auditor, Health Care, Layoffs, Legislature, Legislators, Privatization on March 1, 2013| 7 Comments »

Two years after the Department of Health and Hospitals (DHH) eliminated its six internal audit positions, an employee of the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals (DHH) has been placed on leave and is expected to be fired and prosecuted for the misappropriation of more than $800,000 in state funds, LouisianaVoice has learned.

The employee, a woman, is accused of depositing checks made payable to DHH into a non-DHH account. She would then withdraw the funds from that account for personal use, investigators said. The internal investigation was conducted by DHH’s Bureau of Health Care Integrity.

In addition to conducting its own investigation, DHH notified the Louisiana Legislative Auditor’s Office and the office of East Baton Rouge District Attorney Hillar Moore. The district attorney’s office will be asked to conduct an external investigation and to prosecute the employee. Restitution also will be sought by DHH.

“In January of 2011, DHH eliminated all but one internal audit position and the following month the one remaining auditor retired, leaving no internal audit function at all at the end of Fiscal Year 2011,” Wes Gooch of the Legislative Auditor’s office told a meeting of the Legislative Audit Advisory Council just over a week ago, on Feb. 21.

He said a recent audit showed for the second year, there was “no effective internal audit function” at DHH.

“In December of 2011, DHH contracted with one auditor to perform internal audit services from December 2011 through December of 2012,” he said. “In May of 2012, this contractor submitted a proposed updated internal audit charter and one internal audit report. No other internal audit activity occurred that year,” Gooch said.

“In June of 2012, this contractor exercised the contract termination clause, leaving no internal audit function in place at the end of 2012.

Gooch told the seven legislators in attendance that each year in the Appropriations Act, “the Legislature requires agencies with budgets in excess of $30 million to use existing positions for internal audit services.

“Considering that DHH has over $650 million in assets and over $7 billion in annual revenue, an effective internal audit function is critical to safeguard state assets and operations,” he said in his testimony.

For his part, DHH Secretary Bruce Greenstein was appropriately outraged over the latest findings. We know this because he said so. “I am outraged that a member our staff would allegedly willfully misuse public funds that were intended for health care services,” he said in a prepared statement.

Read Full Post »

The Jindal paradox: he adores but would never work in the private sector (but he would make a splendid Sheldon sub)

Posted in ALEC, American Legislative Exchange Council, Campaign Contributions, Civil Service, Contract, Contracts, Education, Ethics, Governor's Office, Health Care, Higher Education, Layoffs, Legislature, Legislators, Privatization, State Agencies, Transparency on February 24, 2013| 12 Comments »

The burning paradox that is Gov. Bobby Jindal comes down to this: for someone who so obviously loves and embraces the private sector, it’s curious that he has never earned his livelihood in it.

Yes, we know that he “worked” for four whole months for McKinsey & Co. in 1994 but that could hardly be considered as the private sector since the firm primarily serves as a training ground for future bureaucrats and elected public servants.

To paraphrase a 1981 line from actor Burt Reynolds at his Friars Club roast, he’d probably like to thank the little people for putting him into office—but he’d never associate with them.

Of course, should he ever decide to re-enter the private sector and if Jim Parsons should decide to leave the CBS sitcom The Big Bang Theory, Jindal could step right into the role of Dr. Sheldon Cooper and never miss a beat.

Sheldon Cooper, in case you are not a regular viewer (you can catch the show on CBS at 7 p.m. Thursdays or reruns on Tuesdays at 7 p.m. on TBS), is the glue that holds the popular show together. He is academically brilliant (as most would concede Jindal to be) but completely unable to relate to mere mortals (as all would have to agree is a persona that fits Jindal like a glove).

Sheldon is a fount of book knowledge, possessed of an eidetic memory and able to spout figures, dates and statistics with the comparative ease of reciting one’s ABCs but is unable—or unwilling—to perform the simple task of driving a car.

Jindal is a fount of book knowledge, possessed of an eidetic memory and able to spout figures, dates and statistics with the comparative ease….well you get the picture.

Sheldon is completely and totally devoid of human emotion, is unfeeling and unable to communicate in a normal conversation because he has no empathy for his fellow human being. Even in casual conversation, it is impossible for him to avoid insulting the intelligence of those around him, be they peers or subordinates.

Jindal is similarly lacking in those same qualities and likewise cannot speak without offending—be it civil service employees, department heads or fellow Republicans whom he now publicly refers to as being stupid.

Sheldon, when playing board games or video games with his friends, is prone to make up his own rules as he goes along—much to the consternation of Leonard, Raj and Howard, his three friends on the show.

Jindal also is not above tweaking the rules to his advantage as in his exempting the governor’s office from the state’s public records laws—much to the consternation of the media.

But most striking of all the similarities between the two: Sheldon is stubborn and steadfastly refuses to admit to the prospect that he could ever be wrong—about anything.

Jindal, too, is mulishly stubborn and just as steadfastly refuses to entertain the thought that he might be wrong about anything—a trait that goes at least as far back as middle school, according to a former teacher who described him as unwilling to accept correction even then.

But back to Jindal’s undying devotion to the private sector:

His is a strange relationship indeed.

Visit the home a professor, and you’re likely to find shelves upon shelves of books. Visit a hunter and you will find hunting rifles and mounted deer, elk and moose heads. Same with fishermen and the mounted bass that adorn their den walls.

Visit an aficionado of the private sector like, say, the governor of Louisiana and you’re likely to find…photos of smiling campaign contributors.

But you would never find him putting in a typical 8 to 5 day in a cubicle or toiling away in the workaday world like the rest of us. That is so far beneath him as to be comical to even consider.

No, he would never stoop to such a low level. That is for people who can be manipulated, used and even fired at will—by people like him.

Instead, Jindal chooses to reciprocate the private sector’s political campaign contribution largesse by selling off the state, piece by piece, agency by agency to his corporate benefactors while at the same time, selling out hard-working, dedicated state workers without so much as a second thought or a thank you.

The private sector is Jindal’s benefactor, not his employer. Accordingly, he must pander to the corporate suits like Rupert Murdoch, K12, Dell Computers, Marathon Oil, Wireless Generation, Altria, Hospital Corp. of America, Magellan Health Services, Meridian, CNSI, Information Management Consultants, Innovative Emergency Management, Anheuser-Busch, Corrections Corp. of America, AT&T, Koch Industries, the entire membership of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and most of his appointees to prestigious boards and commissions.

No, Bobby Jindal would never earn—has never earned—his living from the private sector.

But make no mistake about it: he owes his political existence to corporate America and the private sector.

And he believes with equal conviction that he owes nothing to state employees or the public sector.

Yes, he could step right in and fill Jim Parsons’ role as Sheldon and the difference would be negligible—except for the obvious cultural imbalance that would create.

Read Full Post »

Notable Quotables (in their own words)

Posted in ALEC, American Legislative Exchange Council, BESE, Contract, Contracts, Education, Governor's Office, House, Senate, Legislature, Legislators, Notable Quotables, OGB, Office of Group Benefits, Privatization, Public Records, Teague on February 22, 2013| 6 Comments »

“I have prepared a bill calling for a constitutional amendment making the Louisiana Superintendent of Education elected and not appointed. It will be difficult to pass, but the people should decide who their superintendent is—not the Governor.”

—State Sen. Bob Kostelka (R-Monroe), in an email Thursday to LouisianaVoice as a result of LouisianaVoice story about plan to provide personal student information to a computer bank controlled by News Corp., owned by Rupert Murdoch.

Read Full Post »

DOE computergate pushback: state senator introducing bill to again make Superintendent of Education office elective

Posted in ALEC, American Legislative Exchange Council, Computers, Education, Governor's Office, House, Senate, Legislature, Legislators, OGB, Office of Group Benefits, Privatization, Public Records, State Agencies on February 22, 2013| 3 Comments »

It’s highly improbable but there is an ever-so-remote possibility that State Superintendent of Education John White could find his job in jeopardy.

Whether he does or not, there is a much greater chance that State Sen. Bob Kostelka (R-Monroe) could find himself removed from his chairmanship of the Senate Judiciary C Committee and/or removed from three other committees on which he now serves.

That’s because Kostelka intimated on Thursday that he intends to introduce a bill in the upcoming legislative session calling for a constitutional amendment making the state superintendent of education position elective instead of appointive.

The office was previously elective until 1987 when it was changed to appointive but now Kostelka wants to change it back.

His announcement came on the heels of a news story this week by Capitol News Service that linked White and the state Department of Education (DOE) to Rupert Murdoch and his News Corp. which was embroiled in the hacking scandal two years ago in which cell phone communications were compromised in Europe.

Emails obtained by CNS revealed plans by DOE to enter sensitive student and teacher information—including names, social security numbers and grades—into a massive electronic data bank being built by Wireless Generation, a subsidiary of News Corp., as part of a project called the Shared Learning Collaborative (SLC) being spearheaded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

The CNS story has generated a movement among parents to notify White and DOE that they do not want any information on their children provided to any outside entity.

The proposed collection of data on students has already begun in a few states and has created considerable controversy in places like New York. That state’s contract with News Corp. was first approved, then cancelled, only to be reapproved last August as one of several subcontractors for Public Consulting Group, one of four contractors chosen for the $27 million contract.

Under the proposal, Wireless Generation is supposed to store student test scores, student demographic information, curriculum materials, lesson plans and other information and would presumably perform the same function for Louisiana.

Though no cost estimates have been provided for the program in Louisiana, providers for the New York program will be paid in part based on the number of school districts that choose their data systems.

The Gates Foundation plans to turn over the personal data it collects to another, as yet unnamed corporation headed by Iwan Streichenberger, former marketing director for an Atlanta company that sells whiteboard to schools.

A copy of a 68-page contract between SLC and the New York State Educational Department was provided by a citizens’ watchdog group in that state. The contract said, in part, that there were no guarantees that data would not be susceptible to intrusion or hacking, though “reasonable and appropriate measures” would be taken to protect information.

“I have prepared a bill calling for a constitutional amendment making the Louisiana Superintendent of Education elected and not appointed,” Kostelka said in an email to CNS on Thursday. “It will be difficult to pass, but the people should decide who their superintendent is—not the governor.”

Technically, the state superintendent is not chosen by the governor but by the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE). The reality, however, is that Gov. Bobby Jindal campaigned for and contributed monetarily to the campaigns of favored BESE candidates in the fall of 2011 after the previous board had held up the appointment of White, Jindal’s choice for the post. Only after several pro-Jindal candidates were elected did BESE eventually formally appoint White upon their taking office in January of 2012.

Kostelka, in authoring such a bill, risks incurring the wrath of Jindal who, in popular Baton Rouge parlance, would likely “teague” Kostelka out of this committee chairmanship and even demote him from his current committee seats to minor committees.

The term “teague” comes from Jindal’s firing of Melody Teague in October of 2009 one day after she testified before the Government Streamlining Committee. She appealed and eventually won her job back.

But six months later, her husband Tommy Teague, was fired as director of the State Office of Group Benefits because he did not endorse the privatization of his agency quickly or enthusiastically enough to please Jindal.

Jindal has a well-established tradition of demoting or firing legislators, state civil service employees and appointees who dare display any independence.

He doesn’t do the actual firing, of course, and even goes to great length to deny any involvement in the decision to fire or demote. Instead, he hands off that task to agency heads or cabinet members do the firing and either Speaker of the House Chuck Kleckley (R-Lake Charles) or Senate President John Alario (R-Westwego).

Read Full Post »

« Newer Posts - Older Posts »